Taming those high-calorie temptations

August 31, 2018 by Len Canter, Healthday Reporter

(HealthDay)—It's the dieter's tug-of-war: the need to lose weight versus the urge to eat high-calorie foods.

Scientists say the easy availability of sweets and other treats has made the desire for them stronger over time. Couple that with a sedentary lifestyle that burns fewer and fewer calories, and battling the bulge is that much harder.

To win the war, your dieting strategy has to include a way to manage food urges, especially when eating for reasons other than hunger.

At the top of that list is stress, a particularly difficult hurdle to overcome because persistent stress may alter the brain's response to food in ways that lead to poor eating habits and, in turn, overweight. Just telling yourself to resist food urges is rarely effective if you're in the habit of reaching for unhealthy treats. In this case, "just say no" is more of a non-strategy.

A helpful tool for dieters is a mental health technique called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. Through ACT, you learn not to ignore triggers, but to accept and counter them by developing a stronger set of life goals and making a commitment to behaviors that lead to reaching these goals. ACT also stresses mindfulness and helps you recognize when you're tempted to eat because of emotional and environmental cues.

ACT teaches:

That urges don't need to be acted on even though denying yourself a treat is an unpleasant feeling.

How to cope with thoughts and feelings related to weight control.

To be more aware of how and why you eat.

Learning ACT with a trained psychologist can be beneficial in many areas of personal growth. Consider this option if you feel that your food urges are too hard to tame on your own.

Mindful eating is increasingly being promoted as a solution to being overweight. Mindful eating, we are promised, will help us eat less, transform our relationship with food and end our battle with weight once and for all. ...

Recommended for you

Policies aimed at removing sweets and crisps from checkouts could lead to a dramatic reduction to the amount of unhealthy food purchased to eat 'on the go' and a significant reduction in that purchased to take home, suggests ...

Children of parents who have alcohol use disorder are more likely to get married under the age of 25, less likely to get married later in life, and more likely to marry a person who has alcohol use disorder themselves, according ...

Folate deficiency creates more problems in connection with DNA replication than researchers had hitherto assumed, researchers from the University of Copenhagen show in a new study. Once a person lacks folate, the damage caused ...

Rudeness. Sarcastic comments. Demeaning language. Interrupting or talking over someone in a meeting. Workplace incivilities such as these are becoming increasingly common, and a new study from Portland State University and ...

A randomized trial by Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center researchers indicates that magnesium optimizes vitamin D status, raising it in people with deficient levels and lowering it in people with high levels.

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.